Sitting on her couch a year ago during a meeting for her dance company’s upcoming season, Karen Kaeja’s mind, and glance, drifted out to the leafy streets of her Seaton Village neighbourhood.

“I was looking outside the window wondering, ‘Wow, I wonder what goes on in that house across the street,’” she said. “I thought it would be amazing to get to know these people, and see what happens when you mix them with a choreographer and create a dance around the story in their home: their life, what they do.”

Thursday night, that daydream comes to life as Kaeja and her husband Allan inaugurate “Porch View Dances,” a series of five performances designed to coax the inner lives of some of those cosy homes out into the open. Porch View Dances marries five choreographers to five willing participants, who will dance their lives out on the porch and front lawn for all to see.

“There’s one solo, two duets, a quintet and a septet,” Kaeja says. The quintet, the Wyncoll-Kerrs, a mom, dad and three kids, is Kaeja’s personal choreographic charge. “It’s the full household,” she laughs. For starters, Kaeja just watched them in their daily rituals at home. The 6-year-old, Willem, proved to be a minor challenge, until Kaeja found a path of least resistance. It proved to be a helpful credo throughout.

“He kind of ignored me, swinging on his swing,” she said. “I said, ‘OK, why don’t you swing six times?’ I put together the different tricks he was doing into a sequence. That’s the opening. I just used what they were comfortable doing.”

Julia Wyncoll, the mother, turned out to be a former dancer. The kids, Willem, Ella, 9, and Olivia, 11, had no such experience. Aside from some minor worries — “Olivia’s just at that age where she could find it all incredibly embarrassing,” she laughed — Wyncoll knew the experience could be a rich one for the whole family.

“I knew it would be really free and fun, and creative,” she says. “I was excited for them to have that experience.”

The father, Garrett, happened to be a sound engineer and collaborated with Kaeja to create a soundtrack that knit together recordings of the kids when they were small with favourite family songs and an overarching track that Kaeja felt suited the performance.

He makes a small appearance. Julia plays a starring role with her own solo. “When I saw the intensity of this mom’s life — taking care of three kids, while running a business, while, while, while — I had to capture the intensity of all that,” Kaeja says.

Using eager non-professionals as performers in so homey a setting introduces an easy, personal intimacy to the performances. But it also broadens the appeal beyond the typically narrow parameters of a traditional dance audience.

“It’s a small niche,” she allows. “With this, even the passerby walking the dog becomes engulfed in it, ideally, and hopefully they get turned on to dance in a larger way. There will be people witnessing it for sure that never go to the theatre. And that’s my target.”

The Kaejas shift well beyond the boundaries of their cosy inner-city enclave in August with a dance series embedded in the Jane/Finch community. Some serious reconsideration was required.

“There aren’t any porches in Jane/Finch,” she says. Instead of putting out calls to households, the Kaejas appealed to local community groups and put together volunteer troupes to perform in a courtyard surrounded by a mass of buildings. “There’s an elderly group, a youth group,” Kaeja says. “It turned out to be a really beautiful opening.”

Working with non-performers — 6 years old and otherwise — introduces its own unique challenges. This week, the Wyncolls started getting a little jittery about performing in public. “I told them that the safety they have as a family is exactly what they need to think about when the audience is there.

“They don’t need to worry about the audience,” Kaeja says. “They just need to stick together.”

To see Porch Dances gather at 84 London Street at 7 p.m. to depart from there for the rest of the program.

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